A New Chapter for Ripple

Oct 6, 2015 | Alec Liu

Ripple is enterprise-grade

Ripple is growing up. Two years ago, we decided that the most impactful strategy for achieving the Internet of Value was to focus on creating core infrastructure for banks, the financial institutions that already underpinned the world economy. Today, we’re proud to announce the release of two complete solutions for real-time settlement and market making.

Our robust pipeline of bank partners has been testing these enterprise-grade products over the last several months. Given successful pilots, financial institutions we’re working with are already moving toward commercial implementations. That’s a major milestone for us in our ongoing mission to make money move like information does today—the first commercial-scale bank deployments of distributed financial technology.

We’ve spent the past two years exploring the existing infrastructure that powers global payments, speaking to hundreds of banks around the world, developing and fine-tuning full-stack Ripple solutions, and successfully completing numerous pilots in which bank partners processed real funds. As part of those pilots and evaluations, Ripple has undergone multi-layered due diligence from banks’ IT, security, compliance and risk departments. This experience has helped us intimately understand the needs of our customer. The result of all of that? Enterprise-grade Ripple solutions are now ready for primetime.

What’s more, Ripple is addressing industry-wide unknowns around scalability and transaction privacy with its implementation of the Interledger Protocol (ILP). Once Ripple is ILP-enabled, financial institutions will be able to process an unlimited number of transactions, transact privately, and denominate fees in their local currencies. (Read more about the ILP here.)

Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our amazing partners, advisors, and investors with whom we share our long-term vision. Today, we also announced that Santander InnoVentures—the fintech investment arm of Santander proper—has joined our recent Series A funding round. This brings the round’s total to $32 million.

This is particularly cool on two levels. First, the goal of the InnoVentures fund mirrors our own—to not only innovate but more importantly, to figure out how new technologies can be leveraged to empower real Santander customers. Second, it’s awesome to be working one of the world’s largest banks by assets that clearly “gets it.” In the bank’s recent Fintech 2.0 report, Santander highlighted the $20 billion opportunity available in financial services thanks to distributed ledger technology. By investing in Ripple, they’re putting their money where their mouth is.

All of which, for us, is incredibly exciting. We’re one step closer to our vision of the Internet of Value. We’re no longer experimenting. We’re delivering. That’s why we’re dropping the ‘Labs’ from Ripple Labs. From now on, it will just be Ripple—and Ripple is growing up.